Law, Policy—and IT?

For the last few days reading about the Petraeus case I knew it was only a matter of time before commentators would ring the privacy bell. This afternoon the NYT published the first of what will undoubtedly become many comments.

For the first time in ten years, I was able to devote my entire week to the EDUCAUSE National Conference. Allow me to share some take-aways from the experience.

With its headquarters in the Boulder area and many a national conference in Denver, Colorado is EDUCAUSE country! It is great to be back here for another stunning national convention!

Business intelligence is all the go these days, and increasingly confused with information management. People are wondering what these functions are exactly, whether they are the same or could be located in the same office. Short answer: no. Longer answer: Read on.

Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is an interesting case more for what it points to than what upon decision will say. It points to big chinks in the armor of "international copyright law," i.e. the Berne Treaty that extended U.S. copyright law to signatories whose arms were twisted to sign in exchange for trade agreements.

On the national policy front, or "Big 'P' Policy, both privacy and security issues are rising to the fore. Do not track mechanisms are, to quote a New York Times recent article on this subject, "features on browsers — like Mozilla’s Firefox — that give consumers the option of sending out digital signals asking companies to stop collecting information about their online activities for purposes of targeted advertising." The market sector is not happy. Microsoft is releasing version 10 of its web browser, Internet Explorer, with a default do not track setting; to allow cookies or other tracking requires the user to change the setting. Business interests have reacted angrily, with the Association of National Advertisers sending Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, an open letter objecting to that decision.

In April of 2001 I began working in the position from which I now write, Director of Information Technology Policy at Cornell. As a law student, I had elected to take a course in intellectual property. Most of my classmates had engineering degrees and were headed for patent law as a career. I was another "Eng." major, English Literature, and wanted to know why publishers of the J.D. Salinger biography had pulled it before it hit the shelves. Turns out, the author had included full texts of letters Salinger had written a long-term lover. The author had access to the letters, but she did not have the copyright in them. A fair use defense would not have sufficed under the circumstances. Consequently, the publishers removed the letters before publication.

We need to rethink the fair use doctrine by adding transformative works as they have been defined in United States case law to the existing four factors that are already codified, and expand its overall usage, especially in the area of not-for-profit educational endeavors.